The non EU spouse of an EU worker may not avail him or herself of freedom of movement rights to enter and reside in a member state of the EU if he or she has been residing there unlawfully, thus evading national immigration rules.

The Court of Appeal has held that control orders of three men suspected of terrorism revoked by the Government should in fact be quashed altogether. The decision opens the door for the men to claim compensation, and deals another blow to the controversial control order scheme.

In deportation and extradition cases, where a signatory State to the Convention has signed a memorandum of understanding with a non-contracting State to facilitate compliance with its Article 3 obligations, it still remained the duty of the signatory State’s appellate immigration tribunal to determine what risks the deportee would be exposed to upon return even with a memorandum being in place.

It was not sufficient, in order to avoid expulsion, to point to the risk of suffering harm from non-state agents in the receiving country. Article 3 of the Convention on Human Rights required an asylum seeker to establish that the receiving country did not provide for those within its territory a reasonable level of protection against such harm.

An escaped Russian prisoner who had not been exposed personally to the risk of inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment in Russian prisons was entitled to the protection of Article 3 by reference to the conditions of detention in Russian prisons generally.

The order for the appellants' extradition to stand trial in the United States for fraud was neither unlawful nor an abuse of the process of court. The extradition would not breach Article 6 since the appellants would not be denied a fair trial in the US, and any interference with their family and private life under Article 8 was justified by the need for the UK to honour her treaty obligations.

Where a mother was unlawfully present in the United Kingdom the decision of a local authority to cease providing her and her two children with accommodation had not been unlawful, perverse or irrational, nor had it been in breach of Article 8.

Refugee Convention claims and Human Rights Convention claims are essentially the same for the purposes of certification under the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002, and asylum claimants should not be permitted to raise fresh claims under one Convention having unsuccessfully argued a case under another.

The “internal flight”option to the applicant meant that the claimed threat to his life in Macedonia was not present and the isolation he suffered as a result of his religion did not amount to a breach of Article 3 of the Convention.

Article 3 of the Convention did not oblige the Home Secretary to make special enquiries into the conditions of accommodation offered under the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999 section 95 so as to ensure that a particular asylum seeker would not suffer ill-treatment contrary to Article 3.

Illegal entrants do not enjoy a right to welfare support under legislation or any of the provisions of the Convention and the right to family life is not infringed by the exercise of a local authority's powers to facilitate travel arrangements for claimants to return to their state of origin.

Where an applicant for asylum produces consistent evidence of persecution before the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal, and the expert evidence does not contradict it, the burden of proof is effectively discharged.

The role of an appellate immigration authority when deciding appeals against refusal of leave to enter or remain on human rights grounds under the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999 is to decide whether the challenged decision is incompatible with a Convention right and therefore unlawful. It does not have a secondary reviewing function based on a finding against the primary decision maker of irrationality, procedural impropriety or misdirection. There is no additional requirement that to succeed on Convention grounds a case must be an exceptional one.

Whilst delay was a relevant factor in considering proportionality under Article 8 of the Human Rights Convention, it was not sufficiently relevant in the appellants' case to be determinative of their claim to remain in the UK.

Detention of asylum seekers at a holding centre for the purposes of operating the fast track procedures for asylum was proportionate and necessary and did not infringe the claimant's rights under Article 8

For an asylum seeker to claim the protection of the "right to family life" under Article 8, there must be a situation of genuine dependency. However, there was no absolute rule that to establish a right under Article 8 there needed to be a family life within the UK.

The Home Secretary was not entitled to maintain his certificate that a claim under Article 3 of the Convention was clearly unfounded because there was a significantl risk that the claimant's wife would commit suicide if she was removed from the United Kingdom thus bringing the removal order into the range of treatment prohibited by Article 3.

Appeal dismissed from the decision of the Administrative Court that the Home Secretary should have provided three asylum seekers with asylum support under the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002 in order to avoid a breach of their rights under Article 3.

In determining whether interference with an individual’s right to a family life was justified to achieve the aim of extradition, the court should not consider whether the circumstances were exceptional but should consider whether the consequences were exceptionally serious

A signatory state to the Convention cannot deport an individual back to his non-signatory state when there is a high probability that the non-signatory state will use evidence obtained by torture in his retrial. Such evidence is prohibited by Convention law not just because it will make a trial unfair, contrary to Article 6, but also because it is in direct breach of Article 3 a fundamental, unconditional and non-derogable right.

The requirement on asylum seekers to claim asylum " as soon as reasonably practicable after entering the UK" did not breach Articles 3 or 8. The way in which the Secretary of State had operated this policy in relation to these particular asylum seekers had been unfair, but once these deficiencies in procedure had been remedied, there was no reason why this policy should not operate effectively.

The Supreme Court has ruled that the UK must provide minimum standards to asylum seekers, including the right to work, whether or not their first asylum application has failed. Asylum seekers will now be able to work if they have been waiting for over a year for a decision

Article 8 of the Convention could be engaged by the foreseeable consequences for the mental health of an asylum seeker of removal from the United Kingdom pursuant to an immigration decision, even where such removal did not violate Article 3, if the facts relied on by the applicant were sufficiently strong.

The entry clearance procedure operated by British immigration officers at Prague Airport unlawfully discriminated against Roma attempting to travel to the United Kingdom by treating them less favourably on racial grounds than non-Roma.

An asylum seeker was only entitled to resist removal to his home country or another state by reference to Article 3 if he could prove that, despite sufficient state protection if the receiving State, the authorities there were aware of a real risk of ill-treatment from law-breakers if he returned.

The secretary of state's decision that it was inappropriate to grant nine individuals discretionary leave to enter the United Kingdom breached the claimants' rights under Article 8(1) of the European Convention on Human Rights.

UK asylum legislation is not incompatible with Article 3 by providing that asylum seekers may be removed to a specified list of ‘Dublin II Regulations’ countries for determination of their asylum claim: the legislation does not restrict the UK from monitoring the asylum laws of those listed countries to ensure they do not pose a real risk of systematically violating Article 3, and it does not restrict the courts from investigating individual cases.

The failure of countries to recognise a right of conscientious objection to compulsory military service, and not to provide a non-combatant alternative to it, did not breach any instrument of human rights.

When is a human rights claim a human rights claim in an immigration context? The High Court has recently considered this question in the case of a Bangladeshi citizen who had her visa cancelled when returning from a trip abroad.

An adoptive child could seek entry clearance under the right to respect for "family life" within the meaning of Article 8 of the the European Convention on Human Rights 1950 even where he had had no chance to bond with his adoptive parents and all his experience had been with his natural parents.

Delay in the processing of an asylum seeker's claim did not give rise to a right to be removed. It did not involve a breach of his rights under Article 8 if there arose a possibility that he would have been granted exceptional leave to remain or asylum if his case had been decided more promptly.

Where an asylum seeker had shelter, sanitary facilities and some money for food, even though he was not entirely well physically, it was impossible to find that his treatment verged on the inhuman or the degrading so as to reach the high threshold of Article 3.

The High Court considered whether a extradition request should be executed if the prison conditions and treatment of prisoners in the requesting State are such that detention there would constitute torture, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment

Is it reasonable to expect an asylum seeker on their return to their home country to lie about their political beliefs and thereby avoid persecution? This question was recently addressed by the Court of Appeal in light of a potentially wide-ranging decision of the Supreme Court relating to gay refugees.